Terminal Freeze by Lincoln Child

I read Terminal Freeze by Lincoln Child on my Kindle. So, I’ll give some feedback on that experience with this particular book. Terminal Freeze is very much a thriller on the order of Michael Crichton. The book is set in the Arctic Circle region of Alaska. A group of scientists are working from the military’s Fear Base to study global warming. There are only a few military personnel still on the base because it has been closed down. The scientists are alarmed at the rapid thawing of glaciers in the area, and they start to notice a really distinctive blood red aurora, around the time they find a prehistoric creature, believed to be a saber-toothed tiger, encased in ice within a cave in one of the glaciers. The local Indian tribe, Tunit, leader journeys to the base to warm the scientists to cease and desist. However, the cogs are the wheel are already in motion. The scientists are there thanks to a grant from a media corporation, who sends out a team of film production people to make a documentary. The producer, Emilio Conte, digs up the chunk of ice enclosing the creature and takes it to the base to thaw an expose on a live broadcast. However, as soon as the thawing process starts, the creature disappears. The production folks believe the creature was stolen, but the scientists start to believe that the creature was flash frozen alive, and that when the ice was thawed, the creature came to life. Well, it turns out he scientists are right, and the creature, much larger and deadlier than a saber-tooth starts to prey on the people at Fear. A blizzard keeps the people at Fear, and it becomes a race to see if the creature can be stopped.

I really enjoyed the thrills of the story. Some of the descriptions of the creatures ripping apart of the people it hunts down can be a bit gruesome, but it’s not so bad that I couldn’t finish reading the book. I didn’t feel that Lincoln Child had such a tight grip on the characters. i wasn’t sure if he planned on featuring Evan Marshall, one of the scientists originally at Fear, or Jeremy Logan, a historian/enigmalogist who is the main character in Third Gate, the new Lincoln Child book. Although the story is formulaic, I still enjoyed it.

My only problem was with the Kindle format. It seems that when the Kindle copy was created, from a print version. At least I assume that because some of the words have hyphens in the middle of sentences, as if the word was originally hyphenated at the end of a sentence. It was consistent throughout the Kindle version, and it really started to irritate me.